Wings Over Scotland

I went for a very long walk before writing this post, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing it in the heat of anger. But 8.5 miles and 18,753 steps later it still needs to be said and there’s no getting out of it, so batten down the hatches, folks.

Last night SNP MP Mhairi Black tweeted what may be the most ill-advised, destructive, offensive, repellent and just downright idiotic thing that I’ve ever seen an elected SNP member do. (Maybe not just the SNP.)

The video, bizarrely made for the amusement of readers of comedy lad-mag website Joe.co.uk, sees Black reading out a series of supposedly “transphobic” and “mean” tweets – almost all from women and only two of which were in any way rude – and reacting to them with a toxic mixture of arrogant condescension, mockery and insults, alongside a tirade of flatly wrong and endlessly-debunked myths.

It concludes with the smirking, sniggering suggestion that women, including survivors of male violence, who’ve expressed their serious concerns over reforms to the Gender Recognition Act – concerns shared by the overwhelming majority of women, and of the population as a whole – are “Jeremy Hunts”, a piece of rhyming slang that doesn’t need any translation.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, unfortunately, but let’s look at some highlights.

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The modern world is an ideological minefield, readers, and is increasingly almost as dangerous as a real one. Having the wrong opinions about things can easily get you fired, ostracised from polite society, arrested or beaten up, and nowhere is this more the case than in the sphere of gender politics.

The extremely brave intersex woman Claire Graham (aka @MRKHvoice on Twitter, her latest account after a series of arbitrary bannings for upsetting the wrong people with statements of biological fact) recently compiled a list of things which are now deemed “transphobic” by trans activists, and given the transience and vulnerability of anything published on Twitter, we thought it was a good idea to preserve it here, with some additions of our own and from others.

[EDIT 9 Dec 2019: Claire has of course now been permanently banned and her original list deleted by Twitter.]

We’ve previously noted how alarmingly this sort of extremist, intolerant and openly violent male bullying in the guise of progressive political correctness has been used in recent months to silence all sorts of people (mainly but not exclusively feminists).

Politicians, police and numerous other authorities in both Scotland and the UK have been complicit – whether intentionally or not – in enabling a terrifying “woke” culture of censorship and intimidation in which the wishes of the vast majority of the public are about to be simply ridden roughshod over, resulting in the creation of laws which could have (and are already having) absolutely horrific consequences.

Anyone raising issues, however, is liable to find themselves at the centre of a vicious storm of outrage, abuse or worse. So if you’re concerned about the imminent abolition of sex but want to stay out of trouble, here’s the stuff you need to avoid.

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Alert readers may recall our ongoing enquiry with the Scottish Conservatives and the Information Commissioner’s Office about what may or may not constitute a lawful and legitimate “petition”, if one is conducted over a period of several years (during which signatories may changes their opinions, or die) and is never delivered to its supposed recipient, but merely used as a data-harvesting device.

And excitingly there’s been a new twist.

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The BBC came in for a spot of criticism this week when its new BBC Scotland channel opted to show some snooker instead of Nicola Sturgeon’s major speech about a new independence referendum. But then things started to get weird.

An alert Wings reader noted that they hadn’t been able to locate any coverage by the state broadcaster of the SNP’s annual conference this weekend either, even though they send live cameras to just about any other party’s gatherings even if they amount to three people in a phone box (hi, Scottish Lib Dems).

The plot swiftly thickened.

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Just you wait and see.

Scottish political pundits: they’ve got all the pieces in their hands, but they still haven’t even worked out that it’s a jigsaw.

So there was a football match at the weekend.

At least three people were stabbed, one very seriously, in violent incidents the likes of which haven’t been seen around Scottish football for years.

But it was probably just a random, unforseeable one-off, right?

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Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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Nicola Sturgeon attended a meeting of the SNP NEC yesterday.

Or maybe she didn’t.

One of these people/publications, inescapably, is flat-out lying to their readers about the event in question. Given the Scottish media’s ingrained habit of lying about pretty much everything almost all of the time, we honestly wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to which one of them it was.

To anyone observing Scottish politics with even half a keen eye, it was obvious from very early on that former athlete Brian Whittle was one of the stupider and nastier elements of the 2016 crop of new Tory MSPs, having been thrashed by more than 12,400 votes in the election but foisted on taxpayers anyway via the list system.

(Trivia fact: Whittle is Holyrood’s most comprehensively rejected MSP. Nobody else in the 2016 election was beaten by such a big margin but still ended up in Parliament. He makes Murdo Fraser – who lost Perthshire North by 10,353 in his seventh defeat on the trot but still got a seat – look like a beacon of popularity by comparison.)

Indeed, an interview in today’s Holyrood Magazine reveals that Whittle is SUCH a dim bulb, he didn’t even realise that if you got elected as an MSP you had to actually go and do the job.

But astoundingly, that’s not even nearly the dumbest thing he says in it.

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Readers may have noted a fairly concerted attempt over the last 18 months or so by the opponents of Scottish independence to get Wings Over Scotland shut down. But sometimes the greatest danger comes from the people you least suspect.

Because the thing SNP MP Pete Wishart is lauding in that tweet earlier today, and has been agitating for for months, would, without a shadow of a doubt, kill this website and scores of others like it overnight.

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Right, let’s wrap this up and hope some actual politics happens soon. By now readers will presumably be aware of our successful fight against the BBC’s shutting down of our YouTube channel last week. The channel is now fully back in service, including all 13 of the clips the BBC complained about.

But the job’s by no means all done. Technically the restoration is only temporary while the BBC conducts a “review” of its attitude towards copyright of news clips, and Peter “Moridura” Curran’s large YouTube archive remains terminated (although we’re not sure to what extent he’s pursuing its return).

And quite a few questions are still hanging unanswered in the air.

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Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were about to write a little more about the issues around the BBC’s takedown of this site’s YouTube channel. Because while we got a very respectable five-and-a-half minutes on Good Morning Scotland earlier today, you never have the time on radio or TV to say everything you want to.

Incidentally, we get the impression – nothing more solid than that – from a number of sources that BBC Scotland are somewhat out of the loop over the whole affair, and the impetus to silence Wings has actually come from London, which is slightly scarier. But aside from that, there are a number of really rather disturbing aspects to the situation.

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